Sarkar, Samskar & Amartya Sen

I recall reading of a forgetful Vicar who would read the burial service while marrying people or the rites of baptism when burying the dead. However, he never tried to justify his behavior by giving reasons why getting married was a type of death. This is what Sen's 'idea of Justice' does. Justice can, like the senile Vicar, misfire but it can't, or ought not to, justify its mistake by giving a 'plurality of reasons'. 

 Sarkar is a word of Persian, and thus Indo-Iranian, origin which means the Governor or Government. Sar means head. Kar means action or actor. Samskara is a Sanskrit word which means ceremony or spiritual trait or residue. Sam has the meaning of completion or joining together. Ritual actions join together human and divine. However, if the round of rebirth is not seen as returning to eternity in God then a notion of samsarana- going round in a circle- defines existence. Without God it is pointless. Thus Buddhism points to a way out of samsara- nirvana- though in the end both are the same as are human and divine in Hinduism. But that is merely philosophy acknowledging it is the love it seeks, not any type of informative knowledge at all. 

Justice in Hindu thought is a 'samskar'- it is itself conditioned and defeasible. So is authority or Kingship. There is no Divine Right to Rule nor does it arise by nature. What is true of sarkar is also true of samskar. Both are contingent and ideographic. This is the common sense view. Some pedants or sycophants may gas on about the perfection and divinity of this King or that Constitution. But their arguments are absurd.

Governance and Justice are both service industries. They can always be improved in a piece-meal fashion provided the overall stability or incentive compatibility of the system is maintained- i.e. the system as a whole remains robust. Since Knightian uncertainty obtains- i.e. all possible future states of the world and their probabilities are not known- a regret minimizing approach must be taken. 

Sen's idea of Justice is that it should be evaluated along a continuum. That's sensible. What is not sensible is to say that it should be evaluated by anybody other than those who pay for that Service industry. If tax-payers feel they are getting better Governance or better Justice then, well and good. They will pay more so Governance and Justice delivery can improve yet further. If Governance and Justice delivery worsen, people will find ways not to pay for either. Service industries which are crappy get disintermediated. People find alternatives. 

Sen never understood economics. He didn't understand that everything is about supply and demand. Supply shite and demand for it falls. The thing will disappear or get confined to a repugnancy market. It is of course possible to create an abstract model for the determinants of demand. There is nothing wrong with a transcendental or axiological approach to this provided it can 'operationalized' and tinkered with to make good enough predictions. What is utterly pointless is 'evaluating' what exists without consulting the people who pay for it. Where there is competition of some sort, the people supplying stuff will try to improve the product to retain customer 'loyalty' and prevent 'exit'. Giving more 'Voice' to the customer can help achieve this outcome provided you filter out the antagonomic nutters and virtue signallers and pedants of all descriptions.

A theory has to filter out stuff which is irrelevant. Thus a theory of Gravitation has to filter out theology and aesthetics and mythology. All relevant reasons must be purely within the realm of Physics. Justice as a service industry has two components. The technical aspects of the subject, on the one hand,  and the economics behind how it is financed, on the other. This is the opposite of Sen's approach. He thinks both the Sarkar and Samskar exist only to be evaluated and given marks by pedants. The basis of that evaluation can be plural so that Teacher can give gold star to the good looking cretin he wants to fuck and a fail grade to the smart kid who belongs to the wrong race or class. 

Sen says- 

The plurality of reasons that a theory of justice has to accommodate relates not only to the diversity of objects of value that the theory recognizes as significant, but also to the type of concerns for which
the theory may make room, for example, on the importance of different kinds of equality or liberty.

This is foolish. Justice isn't the only service industry around. There are others. Political reasons must be accommodated by Politics. Didactic reasons by Education. Aesthetic reasons by Art. Judges who decide they should run everything are judges who will soon be told to go fuck themselves. If they have coercive power for some other reason, they may not fuck off. But this is unjust. It is coercion pure and simple. 

 Judgements about justice have to take on board the task of accommodating different kinds of reasons
and evaluative concerns.

No. Only one thing matters. Is the thing value for money? Does it contribute to robustness or will it crash the system? If not it isn't value for money at all. It is a luxury Society can't afford. 

 The recognition that we can often prioritize and order the relative importance of competing considerations does not, however, indicate that all alternative scenarios can always be
completely ordered, even by the same person. 

Sen is speaking of preferences. Judgments are protocol bound and buck stopped. They can always be totally ordered. Indeed, that is the function of the Supreme Court. 

A person may have clear views on some rankings and yet not be sure enough about some other comparisons. The fact that a person can reason his or her way into rejecting slavery or the subjugation of women does not indicate

anything at all. Neither matters in the slightest to our daily lives. We are merely expressing a preference of an affiliative kind. This has nothing to do with arriving at a judgment in the manner that juries do. 

 that the same person must be able to decide with certainty whether a 40 per cent top rate of income tax would be better than – or more just than – a top rate of 39 per cent.

This is not a judgment we are required to make. The Chancellor of the Exchequer- sure. But not the rest of us.

 Reasoned conclusions can easily take the form of partial rankings,

not if they are conclusions. Sen is still thinking of preferences. But once you've picked your pizza toppings and paid your money a conclusion has been reached. 

 and, as has been discussed earlier, there is nothing particularly defeatist in that acknowledgement.

But there is something demented about it. Sen misunderstood decision theory and then thought judgments were the same kind of decision. Kant had some crazy theory about how people make a judgment to make judgments. This was because he didn't know the Law but he had a vague idea that a well run State had super nice Judges and like everybody should be a Judge giving themselves nice laws and everything not verboten is compulsory. 

If incomplete resolution can be a part of the discipline of an individual’s evaluative assessment, 

it can't if the assessment is action-guiding- i.e. genuine. What you do is the result of your assessment. You may argue that your assessment was incomplete. Had you had more time to reflect or not been off your head you wouldn't have punched your boss and got naked at the Christmas party. 

it plays an even more prominent part in what public reasoning can be expected to yield. 

No. Why? Public reasoning may be based on virtue signalling or affiliative concerns. Preference Falsification will be rife. People will pretend they want stuff which they don't at all. 

When dealing with a group, there is need for accommodation not only of different individuals’ respective partial rankings, but also of the extent of incompleteness that may exist in a shared partial ranking on which different individuals can reasonably agree.

Fuck off! Econ theory says 'transferable utility'- i.e. paying people off- is what keeps groups together. Partial rankings fade away coz peeps be partial to moolah. 

 It was Mary Wollstonecraft’s claim that if and when people examine with impartiality the reasons for respecting women’s basic freedoms, they will agree that ‘reason calls for this respect’. 

She was wrong. It took a hundred years for married women to gain control of their property but that only happened because wealthy women were preferring to remain spinsters while maybe having sex with gigolos on their Continental excursions. The bottom line is that women were proving good money managers. The bourgeoisie came to see them as safer custodians of family wealth. Also, wealthy women might give money to the Radicals and help them get into Parliament. Ultimately, women were more likely to be Conservative so the Left was slitting its own throat for a virtue signalling reason. 

The actual disagreements that exist may be removed through reasoning, helped by questioning established prejudices, vested interests and unexamined preconceptions.

Only if there is no plurality of reasons. We can agree on which car is faster or which car gives better mileage. We can't agree on which is the best car absent any budget or other constraint. 

Many such agreements of real significance can be reached, but this is not to claim that every conceivable problem of social choice can be settled this way.

Transferable utility is the answer. Pay off some. Tell others to fuck off before you shove your boot up their arse. 

Plurality of reasons can sometimes pose no problem for a definitive decision, whereas in other cases it can pose a serious challenge.

No. It is easy to show that 'plurality or reasons' is stoooopid shit. One could speak learnedly of Kunh's no neutral algorithm argument or you could stick with just tell Sen-tentious cunts that they are stoooopid.

 The case of the three children with claims on a flute, discussed in the

Introduction, illustrated the possibility of an impasse in trying to decide what would be the just thing to do. 

Nonsense! The kid who made the flute owns it. There is an uncorrelated asymmetry which picks out one and only one candidate. This is a canonical solution. 

But the acceptance of a diversity of considerations does not entail that an impasse would

necessarily arise. Even in the case of the three children, it may turn out that the child who has made the flute, Carla, is also the poorest, or the only one who knows how to play the flute. Or it might be the case that the deprivation of the poorest child, Bob, is so extreme, and his dependence on something to play with so important for a plausible life, that the poverty-based argument might come to dominate the

judgement of justice.

But Bob loses the flute when a poorer kid comes along. His title is not secure. Only Carla has an uncorrelated asymmetry. 

 There can be a congruence of different reasons in many particular cases. The idea of justice does, it would seem, include cases of different types, with easy resolution in some instances

and very hard decisional problems in others.

Not in this case. There is a clear uncorrelated asymmetry. If Bob says he made the flute but has now forgotten how to do so because Carla, after learning the technique from him, whacked him on the skull, then there may be a hard decisional problem if Anna backs his story. Otherwise the kid who can make flutes must have made this flute. 

One implication of this line of reasoning is the recognition that a broad theory of justice that makes room for non-congruent considerations within the body of that broad theory need not thereby make

itself incoherent, or unmanageable, or useless.

Non-congruent considerations relate neither to questions of fact or law. They don't belong in a theory of justice. They do belong to the realm of political science. 

Justice is a separate 'Samskar' or set of samskars. You don't read the burial service at a wedding. On the other hand, the 'Sarkar' has to weigh up different 'non-congruent' considerations. But, ultimately it has to do with what promotes its own robustness. 

 Definite conclusions can emerge despite the plurality.

Judges can decide that the matter is not justiciable by reason of the doctrine of political question. Similarly, the Sarkar can say 'this is a matter for Religion and Spirituality or personal Faith. It is outside our scope.' India did not get rid of its Army at Independence. Nehru made it clear that Gandhi was a spiritual, not a political, guide for the INC. 

When the competing concerns reflected in that plurality have far-reaching merits, on the relative strength of which we remain partially undecided, then it would make good sense to try to see how far we can go even without resolving completely the problems of relative weights.

In other words we can do stuff without endless deliberation and exhaustive reasoning. But that's why executive privilege exists. 

 And sometimes we can go far enough for the theory to be of very considerable use in application, without sacrificing any of the rigorous demands of each competing line of argument.

Sen's ideas have been useless to all but time wasting bureaucrats and shitty academics. On the other hand this does involve 'transferable utility'- i.e. buying off minorities and nutters of various sorts by paying them be 'consultants'. 

The competing criteria will yield different rankings of alternatives, with some shared elements and some divergent ones. The intersection – or the shared elements of the rankings – of the diverse orderings generated by the different priorities will yield a partial ordering that ranks some alternatives against each other with great clarity and internal consistency, while failing altogether to rank other pairs of alternatives.

This is not the case unless the competing criteria themselves are wholly independent in a certain mathematical sense. Otherwise, a ranking according to one criteria will be partially determined by another criteria. The problem is that we don't know how to 'carve up reality along its joints' or get a pure theory of Justice that is different from a pure theory of Government or Economics or Aesthetics or whatever. Even if we have pure criteria, a small change in the information set might not alter the ranking of the pure criteria (whose robustness arises out of purity) but would alter every other ordering. 

In practice, the problem is solved by 'transferable utility'- i.e. moolah or the threat of a thrashing. 

The Sarkar uses 'saam-daam-dhand-bhed' (persuasion, bribes, punishment and 'divide and rule' tactics. Sen-tentious shite may be part of this corrupt practice but because it is stoooooopid it will quickly backfire. The taxpayer will rebel. 

 The commonality of the shared partial ranking can then be seen as the definitive outcome of that broad theory. 

In which case the theory doesn't matter. Just looking at preferences is enough to establish a universally acceptable program. As a market of fact, there are plenty of pollsters and focus group mavens and so forth doing stuff like that. They don't need to read Sen's garbage. Look at Prashant Kishore. He is the King-maker of India. He understands Samskar and Sarkar well enough to actually bring about the sort of change he wants to see. 

Definitive conclusions are of use as and when they emerge, without there being

any necessity to look for something of a guarantee that a ‘best’ or a ‘right’ choice must invariably emerge in every case in which we are tempted to invoke the idea of justice.

In which case there is no idea of justice. If 'definitive conclusions' emerge, well and good. But no theory or idea has contributed to it. It just so happens that people's preferences are unanimous on certain points. However, they may all be wrong. It may not be just to sacrifice your first born to Ba'al. 

The basic issue here, which is simple enough when shorn of the

analytical formalities, is the need to recognize that a complete theory

of justice may well yield an incomplete ranking of alternative courses

of decision,

This can't be the case. Protocol bound, buck stopped, juristic procedures give a total ordering- but only over justiciable matters. There, in each and every case, there is a single 'ratio' not a 'plurality of reasons.  

and that an agreed partial ranking will speak unambiguously

in some cases and hold its silence in others.

In which case we don't need no theorists. But reality is different. We do need a theory of every particular type of reason. If the reason is 'Gravity' we need a theory of gravity. If the reason is 'fair division' we need a theory of fair division. These can be as ideal or utopian or artificial as they like.  

When Condorcet and Smith argued that the abolition of slavery would make the world

far less unjust,

Condorcet said slavery is a crime. He did not consider whether a greater injustice- e.g. the colonization of Africa- might not result if African potentates could not trade captured slaves for guns and trade goods. 

they were asserting the possibility of ranking the world with and without slavery, in favour of the latter,

No. Condorcet says 'this is a crime like murder. Stop it now.' He wasn't 'ranking the world'. Had he lived longer he might have decided that slavery was a crime that we must tolerate till France is strong enough to suppress that evil.  

We all make judgments of this sort. Putin is committing a crime in Ukraine. But it that crazy mofo threatens to blow up the world we may have to turn our backs on Zelenskyy's valorous people. We prefer a world in which some people are killed or enslaved to a world where nobody is left alive. 

that is, showing the superiority – and greater justice – of a world without slavery.

This simply isn't true. There are necessary evils we have to put up with. 

In asserting such a conclusion they were not also making the further

claim that all the alternatives that can be generated by variations of

institutions and policies can be fully ranked against each other.

 And yet, unless they knew all the various possible states of the world, they had no justification for saying a world without slavery would be better. Furthermore, if all things are connected to each other- i.e. a butterfly's wings could cause a tornado in a distant place- only an omniscient being would be able to rank things on a consequentialist basis- i.e. as leading to world with more or less of a particular desiderata. Religion says that there are 'supererogatory' actions. But this does not mean God is indifferent to them. There is no reason for us to believe that an omniscient being who possesses a 'slingshot' reason wouldn't have a total ordering. This was certainly Liebniz's conclusion. God ensures this is the best of all possible worlds. You can be an occassionalist and think that God is the efficient cause when agitating, as a windowless monad, for the passing a law to make slavery a crime.

Slavery as an institution can be assessed without evaluating – with the same

definitiveness – all the other institutional choices the world faces.

Unless you live under the Caliphate. If they had prevailed militarily, sooner or later we'd have to rationalize granting diplomatic recognition to them. One reason, the Saudis chose America over Britain is that the Americans had no problem handing back runaway slaves who tried to claim asylum on diplomatic premises.

We do not live in an ‘all or nothing’ world. 

We live in 'all or nothing' jurisdictions.  

It is important to emphasize, particularly to avoid a possible misunderstanding, that the agreed acceptance that is sought is not exactly the same thing as complete unanimity of different persons’ actual preference rankings over the domain of the reasoned partial ordering. 

The problems here relate to preference revelation. There is a good reason we hide our own true preferences even from ourselves. There is evolutionary survival in both deceit and self-deceit. Kafka's toxin shows why our beliefs and preferences and so forth should be strategic. 

In any case, getting preference rankings costs money and people soon tell market researchers to fuck off unless they get paid good money. But they then give nonsensical answers.  

There is no presumption here that every slave-owner must opt for renunciation of his rights over other human beings – rights that are given to him by the established laws of the land.

Manumission was legal. But the laws can change and rights can be taken away from some and bestowed on others. It is a different matter that the slave owners may receive monetary compensation. That's what happened in the British West Indies. But it isn't what happened in the American South.  

The claim that Smith or Condorcet or Wollstonecraft made was, rather, that arguments in defence of slavery would be overwhelmed by the case for abolition, given the requirements of public reasoning and the demands of impartiality.

But an equal and opposite claim was made by their opponents. In general, they prevailed. Anyone can make a claim.  

The elements of congruence of surviving impartial reasonings form the basis of a partial ordering underlying the claims of manifest enhancement of justice (as was discussed earlier).

This is not the case. The law of Gravity might not survive impartial reasoning but it will have to be accepted. Everybody might agree that there should be no war. But there will be war. The only partial ordering that Sen has been able to pin point is that of preferences. But preferences are not judgments. They are not decisions. Impartiality is all very well but 'uncorrelated asymmetries' and oikeiosis triumph over all for a reason to do with evolutionary biology.  

Samskars matter. But different Samskars deal with different things. The Vicar does not read out the burial service at a wedding.

Similarly what the Sarkar does matter. Both Samskar and Sarkar are partial and based on previous 'residues and derivations' as Pareto put it. Reasoning for a particular purpose can become 'canonical' to a greater and greater extent. But this is not the case for a 'plurality of reasons'. For all we know, there may be a 'slingshot' or 'theory of everything'- i.e. just one big reason. It may appear that some deliberative process has achieved a 'partial ordering'. This is not true. A particular decision was made and there may have been some 'transfer of utility'. This could be because people with little 'skin in the game' give in to the nutters. But that is preference falsification not revelation. 

To be useful, a social ranking must

actually exist. But to get a social ranking would be very very expensive. We can afford a Census only once every 10 years. That provides some basic information. To get a 'social ranking' would be very very time consuming. There are many a priori reasons to believe that what you get will be junk. If I am forced to fill out a 1000 page questionaire, I will simply tick boxes randomly or declare that it is against my religion or that I am illiterate.  

 have some substantive coverage, but need not be complete.

In which case, it could be argued that till it is complete, all the other choices are impugned. Indeed, a defense in law is to say that the action is not justiciable. It falls under the rubric of something where no judicial decision one way or another has been made. 

A theory of justice has to rely fundamentally on partial orderings based on the intersection – or commonality – of distinct rankings drawing on different reasons of justice that can all
survive the scrutiny of public reasoning.

No. It has to have a doctrine of justiciability. It is not required to make certain sorts of judgments but must be able to say which law or right has superiority over all other rights or laws in a particular case.  

In the particular example of the three approaches to allocating the flute (discussed in the Introduction), it is quite possible that no unanimity may emerge at all in the rankings between those three alternatives.

The reverse is the case. There was an uncorrelated asymmetry which picked out one and only person in a robust manner. This was the canonical solution.  

If we are specifically concerned with a choice between precisely those three alternatives, we shall not be able to obtain help from a ranking that is incomplete in that choice.

This may be true of choice. It is not true of protocol bound, buck stopped, juristic reasoning. There is always a 'ratio' which decides between options unless the thing is not justiciable or trifling. 

On the other hand, there are a great many choices in which a partial ordering with specific gaps could give us a great deal of guidance.

The Court may indeed take numerous considerations into account in deciding how to make the victorious defendant whole in a civil matter. But the judgment is either guilty or not guilty. After that, if the solution given by the Court is found to be ineffective, the injured party can re-approach the Court asking for a different remedy. 

If, for example, through critical scrutiny of reasons of justice, we can place an alternative x above both y and z, without being able to rank y and z against each other, we can comfortably go for x, without having to resolve the dispute between y and z.

This is foolish. The Judgment has to be guilty or innocent. As I said the remedy may be subject to revision if inefficacious or inequitable.  

If we are less lucky, and scrutiny of reasons of justice does not yield a ranking between x and y, but places both x and y above z, then we do not have a specific choice that emerges from considerations of justice alone.

I suppose a Judge could say 'actually, in this case there are two ratios I could have used.' But that is obiter dicta. He has to plump for one ratio. If he gets it wrong, the judgment may be reversed on appeal. 

And yet reasons of justice would still guide us to reject and shun altogether the alternative z, which is clearly inferior to both x and y.

This is not the case. A Judge may say ratio x and y apply strongly but there is a reason of State why they won't be used in this particular case. This is obiter dicta. The ratio of the judgment may be inferior but it it is required in the public interest.  This could also be the case where conviction is unsafe by reason of the manner in which facts were ascertained. 

Partial orderings of this kind can have quite a significant reach; for example, if it is agreed that the status quo in the United States, which does not come anywhere close to universal medical coverage, is distinctly less just than a number of specific alternatives which offer

different schemes of coverage for all, then on the grounds of justice

no, on the grounds of public interest- this is a political not a judicial matter though, no doubt, a particular policy instrument may be judged unconstitutional.  

 we can reject the status quo of non-universal coverage, even if reasons of justice

these are reasons of public policy not reasons of justice. Of course, if there were a human right to medical assistance, then judges can get involved. They could ask the Executive to provide a mechanism for this. But if the Government does not have the means to do much, then Justice has no further recourse. There is an entitlements failure.  

do not fully rank the alternatives that are all superior to the status quo.

Reasons of justice can't rank possible states of the world. A Court can issue a judgment but if it can't be enforced, the matter ends there. Sen did not get that India could not magically give everybody a First World Education and Medical Service just by passing laws saying the State was obliged to do so. Ultimately, such laws are seen as 'arthavada'- mere puffery- not 'vidhi'- binding law.  

We have excellent reason to scrutinize and critically examine the arguments based on considerations of justice to see how far we can extend the partial ordering that emanates from that perspective.

If we actually are Judges in India- sure. But judicial activism soon found there was little it could do in the social sphere. On the other hand they could get a Temple built in Ayodhya. Property disputes can be resolved by the Law. No idea of Justice can make people better off. That is job of Political Economy properly so called- not the worthless shite Sen teaches.  

We have no great reason to turn down the help we get from the partial ordering that we end up with, even if it leaves some choices beyond reach. In the case of healthcare, we would have reason enough to press for universal medical care coverage through one of the specified ways, even if we are unable to agree on other issues of social

choice.

Was this true of America? No. Obamacare raised coverage and lowered the rate of increase of premiums. The huge opposition to it shows that pressing for 'universal coverage' would have been electorally disastrous. But this has nothing to do with 'partial ordering'. It has to do with what is politically feasible and likely to withstand judicial review. Politics has been called, by Bismark, the art of the possible. Is it also that of the 'next best'? No. Sometimes, it is the worst possible course. This may cause a 'shakeout' of the inefficient or the crazy,  or else a reaction such that the country can get back to doing sensible things. Politics is mainly the art of the convenient. Justice is mainly 'stare decisis'- upholding what went before. But the convenient is generally also what is possible. What went before is likely to work just as well now. The Sarkar gains by these 'Samskars' which reassure people that they live in a predictable world. This increases confidence in 'pooling equilibria'. By contrast, Sen's approach- which is to focus on outcomes and do stupid shit just because everybody falsifies preferences to say they believe in pious reasons- causes loss of confidence. Everybody hedges using costly signals (e.g. identity politics) so as to establish 'discoordination games' or 'separating equilibria'. Rights which were meant to protect vulnerable minorities may become the basis of claims by the very rich. Thus has it always been. In medieval times, a stout and sturdy knight would pretend that his property was actually owned by a wee bairn who might be born to ten named matrons of the parish- all above reproductive age. 

The Sarkar understands the Law's Samskars can be used to defeat the ends of Justice or harm the public good. That is why Politics sets limits on the operation of the Law while using it as a check upon itself. 

What is remarkable about Sen's account of the idea of Justice is that he ignores everything that Indian and Anglo-Saxon and every other type of Jurisprudence have taken as settled matters for thousands of years. 

Why did this happen? The answer is he thought bad things only happen because of injustice. If people are poor it is because the rich robbed them. But misfortune is quite separate from injustice. Similarly, preferences or choices are not the same thing as judgments- which, of their nature, are protocol bound and bucked stopped. Lastly, 'impartiality' is not a good thing in itself. Relationships are based on partiality. True, for some specific protocol bound juristic process, impartiality may be desired. But, what is better still is never to have to get involved with such proceedings. If a lawyer catches you by your dhoti, take it off and run naked through the village till you can barricade yourself in your own home. Once people understand you were fleeing the toils of the law they will praise you for your sagacity rather than censure you for public nudity.

Such, at any rate, is the Hindu idea of Justice. After death, Yama can judge us all he wants. While alive we prefer Yamuna and Samskars or a life affirming type. That Sarkar is best which talks bollocks least.